The older I get, the more madeleines I discover, most of them are musical, and at least one is tragic: Billy Joel’s song, “Goodnight, My Angel.”

I’d listened to this song just a few minutes earlier when, in 1999, I received the tragic news that two of my former students in Poland, Marcela and Natalia, had drowned a few days earlier while on an outing to the Baltic Sea. I was staying with my parents because I didn’t yet have my own place, and when I got the call, I was sitting on the floor by the bed in the guestroom that I’d taken over. It’s a song to one’s daughter, but the passage “the water’s so dark and deep” — so tragically ironic.

A beach on the Baltic Sea

The news was a kick in the gut.

Marcela had just finished her freshman year, and I really didn’t know her that well. But I’d been Natalia’s English teacher for three years, and I’d watched her go from a hesitant beginner to a confident speaker who absolutely demolished the required oral exam in English just a few months earlier. She was wise and mature for her age, a real leader in the class, and from the beginning, she always intimidated me a bit. A first-year teacher just out of college, I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing, and Natalia always sat in the back of the room seeming to say with a slight smile on her countenance, “You don’t have the slightest clue what you’re doing, do you?” Later, I realized what she was probably saying was, “Whoa! Slow down! Slow down!” She smiled a lot, even when nervous — we all do that, I think.

Every time I hear that song, I think of Natalia. I try not to imagine what her parents went through, learning their intelligent, beautiful daughter was gone because I’d start imagining what I’d do if some similar tragedy befell my own daughter. That’s when the “my angel” hits me. I try not to imagine what kind of woman she’d be now, likely a mother in her late thirties, old enough to have a child that could be sitting in my own classroom now. I don’t have, in fact, any really specific memory of her other than of her sitting in the back of the class, smiling slightly, making me feel I’d just done something incomprehensibly stupid, some rookie teacher mistake that even a kid could see.

I can rarely listen to the whole song…